To celebrate my amazing husband’s birthday today I am posting two sketches that I particularly like, the first from 1979 and the second from this past spring.

My favorite person to sketch over the past 40 some years is my husband, Peter. I have so many sketches of him and while they do show his change from a young man with a head of curly hair, they also show his consistent persistence as a thinker, one of his defining characteristics. His work has been all about capturing elusive ideas until he can describe the idea clearly, usually with mathematics. It is so interesting to me that sketch after sketch show Peter bent over his work, his face and body communicating the range of emotions (curiosity, puzzlement, indignation, delight, scorn, frustration, patience, exhaustion, admiration, astonishment…) that pinning down ideas elicits in a researcher. I have been incredibly lucky to know, live with and sketch this man.

Happy Birthday Peter!

The sketch from 1979 is made with pencil and watercolor on newsprint. The sketch from 2016 is pen and watercolor on multimedia paper. Both are cropped and combined together using Procreate.